Order of Magnitude (A Fish Story)

I am some kind of kooky obsessive about geothermal energy. It comes from over twenty years of experience explaining the chronic false claims of ground source heat pumps by the U.S. Department of Energy and others.

Sometime in November-December 2017 I learned climate science untruthers have repeated the untruth that geothermal energy (or any "recent" or local natural variations in geothermal energy) could be contributing to the stipulated warming of the Earth. I read two webpages at Skeptical Science (https://www.skepticalscience.com/heatflow.html and https://skepticalscience.com/underground-temperatures-control-climate.htm). Both pages easily debunk the untruth (they term it a "myth") and both link to a website which mentioned the "massive heat inside the Earth" in November 2011 (after the dates on the September 2011 Skeptical Science webpages) and included it with the following nonsense. As a bonus it says it might have started with nuclear tests.

... There are other possible causes which could be associated with 2,000 underground nuclear tests (causing damage to the crust which allowed more heat to escape from the liquid core of the Earth) or related to small variations in the temperature of the core itself, which is about 5,400 degrees C. 

In regard to the latter possibility, we don't need a high heat flow - just a high temperature for the core to affect the surface climate.  There is massive heat inside the Earth and, as it escapes, the temperature falls along a continuous trend which passes through the surface and atmosphere until it reaches space.  Physics tells us that the average gradient of the trend is determined by the temperatures at each end, namely that in the core and that in space.  Thus the temperature at the surface is locked in by the temperatures in the core and in space.   

This may help you to understand the process:  even just 100 metres underground the temperature is very stable over the course of hundreds of years.  As you come closer to the surface you will observe slight variations between summer and winter, but not much.  Of course you will see daily variations just a few centimetres down, but, overall, the stable temperatures underground (which have been established over billions of years primarily as a result of heat generated underground) will tend to control climate.  You can draw an analogy with a small glass of water in a large air-conditioned room.  The temperature of the water (representing the oceans and land surfaces) will be controlled by that of the air which represents the far greater thermal energy in the rest of the Earth under the surface. 

(https://web.archive.org/web/20111109000617/http://climate-change-theory.com/)

The true effect of geothermal energy on the temperature of the surface of the Earth has been published for about 200 years. Joseph Fourier described it this way in 1824, when he wrote his paper "to invite attention to one of the most important questions of natural philosophy, and to present general views and results."

In a globe of iron the increase of a thirtieth of a degree per metre, would only give a fourth degree of actual elevation of temperature at the surface. This elevation is in direct ratio to the conducting power of the substance of which the crust is formed, all other conditions remaining the same. Thus the excess of temperature, which the terrestrial surface has at present, in consequence of this internal source, is very small; it is probably below the thirtieth of a centesimal degree, (1/15° Fahrenheit.) We ought to remark that this last result can be applied to all suppostions which can be made upon the cause, whether it be regarded as local or universal, constant or variable. 

(http://nsdl.library.cornell.edu/websites/wiki/index.php/PALE_ClassicArticles/GlobalWarming/Article1.html)

By the end of December I hadn't found any geothermal climate science untruths other than reported by Skeptical Science in 2011, so I tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/energy_pe/status/947238516391542786

Then, on 2018-01-18 @_Geothermal_ retweeted this:

I replied to myself, quote-tweeting Rupert Darwall's quote-tweet of a climate scientist. Then on 2018-02-06 I came across a tweet linking to another climate untruther's profile on desmogblog.com and remembered to find Rupert Darwall there. I replied to myself, quote-tweeting him again, tagging @DeSmogBlog, tagging the climate scientist he'd trolled, and comparing him to Doug Cotton (responsible for the http://www.climate-change-theory.com nonsense I quoted above). I also replied to my new reply with a link to Rupert's desmogblog.com profile. A couple of hours went by, and then he nibbled at my bait:

https://twitter.com/RupertDarwall/status/960977641569439747

I "liked" his reply, took screenshots in case he deleted them, and made him wait while I worked on a reply I didn't think I'd need. Rupert Darwall is a twitter fish who is two orders of magnitude bigger than me but I knew he was an untruther and was screaming a fringe untruth to his followers. I wondered if I cast the same geothermal lure he'd be enough of a dunce to hit it harder, not knowing my bait was 100% rock and metal. I gave him a chance to walk it back, writing him the truth, giving him a link to the 1837 translation of Joseph Fourier's 1824 paper, and dropping his climate scientist target from the conversation. He typed, "You're being obtuse." I replied, "Where was the word 'geothermal' left out, Rupert?" and again quote-tweeted his creepy 2018-01-18 quote-tweet of the climate scientist's tweet. He replied, "google my CEI paper," getting my hook in his mouth a little bit.

I found his paper and his writing under the heading "West Antarctic Meltdown" made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. He'd referenced some interesting articles he didn't seem to comprehend. I replied with one example of how he'd confused ice shelf with ice sheet, tagging the authors and publishers he'd quoted. I again asked him if he thought geothermal energy affects climate. He replied by changing the subject and asking what I thought caused the "blowtorch" quoted in a New York Times article he'd used. Had I set the hook? I replied, "No one knows," and asked him again where 'geothermal" was left out of the climate scientist's tweet. I left my rock and metal hook dangling in the water and ran errands.

While I was gone, Rupert replied asking a vague question about geothermal energy. My hook was set and I wasn't watching! Fortunately, Justin Gillis, who'd written the New York Times article Rupert had used in his CEI paper, saw my line moving in the water and cast his own reply. I liked his reply not only because he's a better fisher than me; the bonus was he immediately invoked ORDER OF MAGNITUDE which I can't do without pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose. Does Rupert Darwall understand orders of magnitude? It doesn't matter. He swallowed my rock and metal hook and rudely engaged Justin Gillis after he'd been kind enough to point out Rupert was off by at least an order of magnitude:

https://twitter.com/RupertDarwall/status/961700987273732096

If you scroll down the replies, you'll see how Mr. Gillis watched Rupert swallow more hooks, then netted him, and tossed him on the dock. Then he asked Dr. Eric Steig if he had time to demonstrate his practiced technique for quickly cleaning geothermal zombie fish. He did, and he did. Some say this was his most fundamental tweet of the thread:

https://twitter.com/ericsteig/status/961944264862179329

Thanks to logarithms, the order of magnitude of energy is easily estimated by summing the order of magnitude of power and the order of magnitude of time.

https://twitter.com/RupertDarwall/status/961965394008428545

I took the opportunity to write this up for you, Rupert. No plan really, just fishing.

The False Claims of Ground Source Heat Pumps

In 2010 I emailed an employee of a Midwestern state energy agency, following a public conference call about a state energy-efficiency spending plan, which the employee helped present,

I want to follow up on my concern about referring to ground source heat pumps (GSHP) as "geothermal."  This term has been incorrectly applied to GSHPs since the 1990s.  The term is extremely misleading and at least some people who use it actually believe that is makes use of the renewable geothermal energy resource in the earth, which it does not.  I'm was particularly concerned when I thought I heard you say on the call that [state agency] plans to report on renewable energy recovered through its agricultural GSHP program.  I hope I misunderstood.  GSHPs are the most efficient electric heating technology.  They do not use renewable energy unless they use electricity generated from renewable resources.

I made a couple of typos, but I think the state employee's reply has a couple of non sequiturs,

Ted, I don't think we are reporting geo as an alternative;
However, common nomenclature claims  ground source as "geo". 

change is like trying to  rename Kleenex.

False Claim: Ground Source Heat Pumps Use Geothermal Energy

The first non sequitur changed the subject from geothermal to "geo." "Geo-" means earth and the ground is part of the Earth; using "geo-" with ground source heat pumps is not the issue. It's the "-thermal" part of "geothermal heat pump" that's the issue, which the employee did not type. Maybe they were in a hurry, unaware "-thermal" is a false claim, or wanted to defend it without typing it. The reason also can be "willfully unaware," as I was following up on a comment I made during the call when state employees used the term "geothermal heat pump." I explained how it was misleading and why they needed to stop using it. The reply also avoided the words I wrote concerning another false claim made on the call, that ground source heat pumps provide "recovered" renewable energy, instead "thinking" they aren't reported as "alternative." After I discuss the second non sequitur, I'll show how energy at ambient temperatures, transferred from the ground by cooler heat pump evaporators, is regularly updated and reported as consumption of renewable energy, alongside hydroelectric, solar, wind, and others in Section 10, Renewable Energy, of the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) Monthly Energy Review.

When I read the state employee's email I thought, "Nobody ever tried to rename Kleenex, but probably not the meaning they intended. They probably think of geothermal as a brand, like Kleenex." The word geothermal originated in the 1870s. Scientific knowledge of the nature of the geothermal gradient and its resources increased and geothermal is the word used to describe the outward flow of thermal power from the interior of the Earth. Like solar and tidal, it's the adjective for a unique, natural power source, it's not a trademark that got confused with generic substitutes so it now includes local average ambient temperature. I understood the meaning of their last two lines as, "I don't know what geothermal means, nobody knows what geothermal means, the cat's out of the bag and all facial tissues are Kleenex to everybody." Then I wrote,

Kleenex is a brand of facial tissue paper, which marketing convinced people to use in place of washable, cloth handkerchiefs while also, through poor trademark protection, make it synonymous with facial tissue paper in general.  Your analogy would be more apt if people began calling all geysers Old Faithful, or even all geothermal features Old Faithful. Geothermal is the facial tissue paper in your Kleenex analogy.  It's a generic definition for a thing, not the specific name for one of the many global features of this natural phenomenon.

This was worse than my original email since I gave an unqualified legal opinion about trademark protection, another typo, and then I denigrated the aptness of his simile, which I called an analogy. My attempt to explain why I thought the state employee was wrong also hasn't aged well for me because I've since seen the first geyser known to modern Europeans, located in Iceland and named Geysir. Its name became the English word "geyser" for all similar hydrothermal features, including Old Faithful. It became the Kleenex of geysers, or Kleenex became the Geysir of paper facial tissue since Geysir's name was borrowed before paper facial tissue existed. Either way, since I couldn't find the email thread until recently, I had developed another analogy where ground source heat pumps are paper facial tissue.

• ground source heat pump = paper facial tissue
• WaterFurnace® = Kleenex®
• geothermal power systems = cloth handkerchief
• geothermal heat pump = cloth paper facial tissue

The terms "geothermal heat pump" and "cloth paper facial tissue" are each an oxymoron, like "stored heat." While geothermal power systems and ground source heat pump systems both touch the Earth, only geothermal power systems are designed to touch ground temperatures that can do useful work. Kleenex and handkerchiefs both touch noses, but only handkerchiefs can be renewed by the work of washing. My analogy might work better if one cloth handkerchief were worn out for every 4800 paper facial tissues since 1:4800 is the ratio of geothermal power (0.082 W/m^2) to infrared power (398 W/m^2) emitted by the Earth's surface. Geothermal power does not maintain the temperature of the ground, which is the source/sink of ground source heat pumps, the Sun and the atmosphere do.

False Claim: Ground Source Heat Pumps Use Renewable Energy

The U.S. EIA regularly reports on renewable energy production and consumption in Section 10 of its Monthly Energy Review. Table 10.1 is titled, "Renewable Energy Production and Consumption by Source (Trillion Btu)." Footnote "a" describing Production begins, "For hydroelectric power, geothermal, solar, wind, and biomass waste, production equals consumption." Geothermal Consumption is described by footnote "f" as "Geothermal electricity net generation (converted to Btu by multiplying by the total fossil fuels heat rate factors in Table A6), and geothermal heat pump and direct use energy."

The renewable geothermal energy consumption column from Table 10.1 is the top (blue) line in the following chart legend, and is the sum of consumption by the residential, commercial, industrial, and electric power sectors reported in Tables 10.2a, 10.2b, and 10.2c. The electric power sector geothermal consumption data, Table 10.2c, the second (teal) line, is equal to the product of the geothermal data in Table 7.2b, "Electricity Net Generation: Electric Power Sector (Million Kilowatthours)" and the total fossil fuels heat rate factors in Table A6 (BTU/kWh), divided by 1,000,000 to convert to trillion BTU.

The third (red) and fourth (tan) lines in the chart legend are California geothermal electric generation statistics. Increases in geothermal electric power production in other states have offset recent decreases in California. The third line uses a constant heat rate and the fourth line uses Table A6 heat rates to convert Gigawatthours to trillion BTU.

The fifth (grey) line, the difference between the total geothermal consumption (Table 10.1, blue) and the electric power sector geothermal consumption (Table 10.2c, teal), is the sum of the geothermal energy consumption by the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors (Tables 10.2a & 10.2b), which are plotted individually as the last three solid lines in the chart legend (maroon, olive, & blue).

The dashed lines in the chart are data from Table 4.17, "Geothermal energy consumption by direct use of energy and from heat pumps, 1990-2009 (quadrillion Btu)" from the Renewable Energy Annual 2009 (REA), published January 2012, the last edition of this discontinued EIA report. The total geothermal energy consumption reported (dark grey dashed) is equal to the sum of the geothermal energy consumption from the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors reported in Tables 10.2a and 10.2b. The green dashed line is "geothermal consumption from heat pumps;" the red dashed line is "geothermal consumption by direct use of energy."

In the same section of the REA, Table 4.11 reports manufacturers' shipments of ground source heat pumps in 2009 totaled 338,689 rated capacity in tons. From Table 4.17, the increase from 2008 to 2009 of "geothermal consumption from heat pumps" is 0.0085 quadrillion BTU. Assuming a heat extraction rate of 10,000 BTU per ton, those new heat pumps would need about 2500 full load heating hours to cool the ground by 8.5 trillion BTU. The EIA Monthly Energy Review sources for the data in Tables 10.2a & 10.2b are similar, "1989–2011: Annual estimates by EIA based on data from Oregon Institute of Technology, Geo-Heat Center. 2012 forward: Annual estimates assumed by EIA to be equal to that of 2011," excepting the last year of Geo-Heat Center data for the industrial sector is 2009, rather than 2011 as it is for the residential and commercial sectors.

The "geothermal consumption from heat pumps" reported in the REA, from the Geo-Heat Center, is an estimate of the heat extracted from the ground by the population of installed ground source heat pumps during the heating season. This is a false claim, repeated regularly by the EIA as consumption of renewable geothermal energy in its Monthly Energy Review.

Some interesting consequences of this false claim:

• After annual updates of Table 4.17 "geothermal consumption from heat pumps" ended around 2010, the EIA assumed annual "geothermal consumption" by direct use and from heat pumps would remain constant thereafter. One impossible explanation for this is that ground source heat pumps manufactured since about 2010 are using the ground only as a heat source/sink while older ground source heat pumps continue to find renewable geothermal energy with their ground loops, as reported in the EIA Monthly Energy Review.
• The geothermal energy accounting scheme used by EIA for ground source heat pumps does not account for the heat rejected to the ground when the heat pumps are in cooling mode.
• If the growth of "geothermal consumption from heat pumps" from Table 4.17 had not stopped in 2011, it might now exceed the geothermal consumption by the electric power sector in Table 10.2c.

Grade school children are taught about the potential energy resources consumed by our built environment; fossil fuels, hydroelectric, nuclear, solar, geothermal, and others, and they are taught, "energy is the ability to do work." When they get to high school physics they learn, "energy can be neither created nor destroyed," the first law of thermodynamics, and they learn not all energy can do work, the second law of thermodynamics. The only useful work done by the ambient, climate dependent temperature of the ground is heating the cooler atmosphere. The surface of the Earth is a high temperature reservoir relative to the average temperature of the atmosphere, but it is a low temperature reservoir relative to our winter indoor environment. Most people who call ground source heat pumps "geothermal heat pumps" or claim GSHPs use geothermal or renewable energy don't have a basic understanding of thermodynamics or the geothermal nature of the Earth, but those that do understand know they are lying.

Taking public transit to the January ASHRAE meeting

I paid $3 to take three buses and one light rail to my meeting today. I was lucky a bus route went right past the banquet center, I only had to walk about 100 yards after I stepped off the last bus. I took Metrobus 56 to Shrewsbury station, Metrolink to Brentwood I-64 station, Metrobus 57X to Ballas transfer center, and Metrobus 98 to 1970 Craig. The total trip from Energy-PE, LLC world headquarters to Spazio's banquet center took about one-and-one-half hours. Nice that it was mostly sunny and not very cold. The Ballas transfer center has a small electricity-heated building in which to wait, with drinking fountains. Metro's equipment is always clean, but the bus stops seem really far apart.

A Geothermal Experience

We spent the night of 2014-03-22 at the Springs Hotel in Hot Springs, AR, on our way home from Fort Worth, TX. This was my younger daughter's spring break college tour (Central Methodist Univ., Univ. of Tulsa, TCU). Drove all day from Fort Worth and had a half hour before the NPS visitor center at the former Fordyce Bathhouse closed, then walked south on the promenade along the hillside above and behind the bathhouses after stopping at the restored open spring on the way up. I washed my hands and face in hot water coming out of a rock there before we even checked in.
The next morning, after about an inch of rain the night before, we found hot water overflowing a storm drain up the hill behind the bathhouses, down the hill from the 43 capped springs, the NPS sources for the potable hot water fixtures. Vapor was rising from a storm drain at the bottom near the Hot Water Cascades, where hot water runs out of the bottom of the hill into descending pools, then into the sewer, and I washed my hands and face at the top pool. After we checked out, I filled my water bottle at a hot spring public drinking fountain and quaffed the elixir while driving home, instead of while strolling down Central.

Not really what I expected to be Energy-PE's first post, but I just read that about 17,500 NASA employees are staying home today. Out of 18,000 NASA employees. I was at first surprised by how small the number was, then immediately felt reassured, that when the anarchists in Congress are finally put in their place, and the American community returns to making the world a better place, a relatively tiny contingent of 17,500 NASA employees will also return to providing our country with what must be one of the best returns on investment in the history of astronomical science.